Posted
by
timothyon Friday December 18, 2009 @09:10AM
from the full-of-holes dept.

cyclocommuter writes with this snippet from The Register's assessment of whether
Microsoft's .NET framework has been a success: "If the goal of .NET was to see off Java, it was at least partially successful. Java did not die, but enterprise Java became mired in complexity, making .NET an easy sell as a more productive alternative. C# has steadily grown in popularity, and is now the first choice for most Windows development. ASP.NET has been a popular business web framework. The common language runtime has proved robust and flexible. ... Job trend figures here show steadily increasing demand for C#, which is now mentioned in around 32 per cent of UK IT programming vacancies, ahead of Java at 26 per cent."

The article says that demand for c# is around 32%, but it should also add in the demand for vb.net, which is less but should be added to the total, as it is in use. In my view, the language features, excellent development environment and comprehensive libraries make.NET a win for most LOB applications - which is the vast majority of all PC applications in use at the moment.

This is excellent point. Recall that the resistance to VB.NET in the VB community was immense, as it introduced significant changes. With time (and the certainty that things were changing whether they liked it or not) VB programmers seem to have moved on.

I think that java had the momentum, and the quality, so ultimately there was something structurally wrong with it that caused the decline in marketshare. The webapp share was taken over by flash, which is far slower than the java vm, because actionscript was easier to program in. If sun had made a ligthweight version of the vm for the browser and simpler language like visual basic, things might have been very different.

I think you transposed some digits. Java's object model is based on Smalltalk, which was first released in 1976. The syntax comes from C, which was first created in 1972. A number of language features (the type system, interfaces, and addition of primitives as well as Smalltalk-style objects) come from Objective-C, which was created in 1986. The generics come from category theory, and apparently someone thought that was a good idea.

As a professional Java programmer, I've watched as Java-the-language has stagnated. Java-the-platform has only thrived thanks to Open Source, and no thanks to the sclerotic Java Community Process and an ineffectual steward in Sun Microsystems.

Java programmers have watched in horror as C# gained fully reified generics, lambdas and closures, arbitrary monadic comprehensions and Hindley-Milner type inference, whilst we've only grudgingly been allowed a broken generics model whilst Sun spent years rejecting and rewriting closure proposals that are still 1-2 years away from adoption.

C# is thriving because it has a benevolent dictator in the form of Anders Hjelberg. Java the language is a stagnant mess.

Moreover, Microsoft seems to earnestly care about putting the geekiest of the geeks in charge of their language development. They have quite a few functional programmers who have a significant say in the future of languages like F#, and continue to produce great libraries for the CLR.

And now of course, IronPython is a dream scripting language that's incredibly easy to host and entirely open source to boot.

I think people unnecessarily mock Ballmer for "Developers, developers, developers!" He was right. It worked, and Java lost, despite having done so many things right first, and having nailed cross-platform application and service design. Or at least, Java is in the process of losing.

I think people unnecessarily mock Ballmer for "Developers, developers, developers!" He was right.

That's not just Ballmer's slogan, Microsoft has focussed on that for the past 15+ years. The trick is to get developers writing code for your platform, and then you'll sell loads of platforms. No manager will buy an alternative because they won't be able to get devs who know alternatives, while there will be plenty of Microsoft developers. That reduces the risk of deploying a platform... and so we see where we a

However, I think I see a glimmer of hope (for the not-more-blinking-MS-stuff view) in scripting languages..

Powershell is pervasive now. Every MS product now has powershell hooks. Most command-line utilities are being folded into Powershell extensions. While the language itself is not to my taste(I much prefer the *nix shells still), it's a big improvement alright.

Powershell was never designed to be used by day to day admins in general administration tasks. GUI for many things allows you to look up data or make one off changes much quicker. Powershell is designed to be used by admins to script common tasks they do daily. I have a Powershell script that will parse a comma delimited text file and add every line in there as Active Directory user with Exchange Mailbox. When we get 30 new employees at work, I modify some parameters on Powershell script, take list from HR and bam, in 15 minutes, I've added 30 new users with Exchange mailboxes. That's purpose of Powershell.

Have you actually used powershell? They've predefined common aliases for most of the command (ls, cd, del - just type get-alias (or gal) to get the full list). All the parameters can be used both positionally, or as named parameters where you only need to provide enough of the name that it's unambiguous (usually one or two characters is enough). On top of all that, there is tab-completion for object members and such.
The purpose of the long, descriptive names is for writing scripts. I can use the abbreviated aliases and shorthands when I'm at the command line, and yet still write scripts that are legible, without having to look up whether -r means recurse or revision in a given context when I'm debugging a script a year later.

Java only has lost the war if you thing the entire world runs on windows and develops for Windows only, sorry it is like that!I work in banking environments where the language is very strong, the reason simply is you develop on windows, then deploy on Unix and the deployment scales up to the big irons from IBM if you need to!

All I can see on C# side for now is that it has gotten the ground that VB and ASP had before, that is the market of develop for windows deploy on windows. Ok this is quite a big market but this is only one part of the picture.

Now with Android we also have a serious push of java being a very popular platform programming language for mobile phones again instead of the trash of J2ME.It is not branded java but the Dalvik VM has clearly java roots!

As I said C# has mostly gathered the ground which was occupied by Microsoft before anyway, quite a big ground but territory java never had.

You're right, of course. Microsoft Research has a number of fellows who are at the very cutting edge of programming language research, including the likes of Simon Peyton Jones (Mr Haskell) and Don Syme.

And these people have had a direct hand in the evolution of C# (through its type inference, lambdas and LINQ), through F# (which started as a project to port Haskell, and then O'Caml to the CLR), the DLR, Parallel Extensions...

The level of geekiness that Microsoft encourages at the top end of.NET is remarka

Of course their reasons for doing it are not benevolent, they want software designed for Windows so that users want to use Windows. Regardless, they produce extremely slick dev tools because of it. Often the things maligned by self proclaimed "real" programmers are actually quite useful dev tools in the right situations.

Visual Basic is a good example, all sorts of geeks liked to hate on VB as being stupid. While they were on to something in that VB wasn't powerful like C/C++, they missed that the reason was that VB was a managed language back before such a thing was popular. It allowed you to easily churn out UIs and things like that with minimal effort and without the need to check for the gotchas you got with something like C. Hence it was quite popular.

What MS has done real well is realized that most developers out there are NOT the hard core "Give me a text editor or give me death!" types. They are people in business trying to get something done, and get it done with minimal fuss and hassle. They also likely have to put up with management idiots who want to change the requirements every 5 minutes and thus being able to rapidly change the software is a benefit.

They really do seem to be a company that is in touch with what developers want.

Computer languages exist to make tools get stuff done, not as temples dedicated to the genius of the individual programmer whose main talent is mental masturbation through obfuscation..Net has made my job remarkably easier even though programming isn't my primary job. I can cobble up some rather remarkable tools to do what I need more quickly and easily than I could in either Java, C or C++.

Visual Basic is a good example, all sorts of geeks liked to hate on VB as being stupid. While they were on to something in that VB wasn't powerful like C/C++, they missed that the reason was that VB was a managed language back before such a thing was popular. It allowed you to easily churn out UIs and things like that with minimal effort and without the need to check for the gotchas you got with something like C. Hence it was quite popular.

It was very popular. Millions upon millions of lines of code were written in VB. The company I used to work for had invested a lot of money over many years in their VB apps. Then microsoft dumped VB6. We tried upgrading to VB.NET (using various wizards) but it proved virtually impossible. Basically we were screwed. The company that made the language we depended on had totally shafted us. We just didn't have the finances to rewrite everything in.NET and at the time I left the company, they still had no rea

Hardly. They care about making companies happy sure; when "development" requires little skill, more people will line up for the job, pay will be less.

And, isn't that the point? Haven't we always said that programmers would automate themselves out of a job? I embrace that... I wouldn't want to be stuck programming in Assembler or C the rest of my life... I rather like other aspects a lot more... then again I'm not a hardcore programmer, I'm one of the business programmer types the GP mentioned.

1) It's impossible to make all development easy, but you can make some parts/kinds of it easier.

That is to say, just because a language like VB.Net makes throwing together a passable UI fast/easy doesn't automatically mean that all VB.Net tasks are easy or that someone who's qualified to slap a DataSet on a web page is qualified to do something more complicated.

2) They're really not competing with free (as in beer) in the sense that you seem to be saying that they are.

One thing I've noticed with generics as a "Java-by-profession, C#-by-hobby" developer is that I prefer many parts of the Java implementation. Having access to the generic parameter type in C# is useful, but it is far more likely that I need the "PARAM_TYPE extends SomeClassOrInterface" method rather than C#'s fixed generic parameters (at least in C# 2.0, which is what I target since Mono has good support and it isn't too huge a download for WinXP users if they don't have it).

One thing I've noticed with generics as a "Java-by-profession, C#-by-hobby" developer is that I prefer many parts of the Java implementation. Having access to the generic parameter type in C# is useful, but it is far more likely that I need the "PARAM_TYPE extends SomeClassOrInterface" method rather than C#'s fixed generic parameters (at least in C# 2.0, which is what I target since Mono has good support and it isn't too huge a download for WinXP users if they don't have it).

C# 2.0 has constraints on generic type parameters of classes and methods, which are exactly equivalent (albeit more verbose) than Java "extends". E.g. you can write:

void Sort(T[] a) where T: IComparable<T>

It doesn't have wildcards, though those can always be replaced by named parameters in generic declaration context.

There are two things missing. First, you cannot write anything equivalent to this Java code:

List<? extends Foo> list;

Again, this is because wildcards aren't supported, and it's not a generic declaration, so there's no way to introduce a named type parameter.

The other thing that's missing is "super" constraint. For example, this cannot be rewritten in C# while preserving full genericity of the method:

<T> void add(List<? super T> xs, T x) {
xs.add(x);}

because "add" is contravariant, this needs the corresponding supertype constraint if we want this to work on any compatible list, but there is none in C#.

On the other hand, C# generics are fully reified - so you can have T[], and new T(), and x is T.

Also, in C# 4, a new feature is declaration-site covariance and contravariance of classes. For example, IEnumerable - which is the.NET counterpart of Java Iterable - is now declared thus:

interface IEnumerable<out T/* covariant*/> {... }

which means that you can write:

IEnumerable<Derived> xs;IEnumerable<Base> ys = xs;// implicit upcast

In Java, you'd have to use "? extends Base" on the second line above, and in any similar context.

Unfortunately, this doesn't help with classes for which some operations are covariant, and some are contravariant, like List. For those, Java wildcards and constraints (which are effectively use-site variance declarations) do better.

Java is relatively stagnant but that is also the reason why big buisnesses simply love it, if you want to stay on the edge and keep the platform then use scala or groovy, there you have closures etc...The platform is more healthy than ever and java as language has become the same status as cobol had in the 70s, stagnant but widely used!As for the JCP you know that 90% of the work the JCP does revolves around the platform not the language?

I am not convinced that it is such a bad thing that Java-the-language is 'stagnated'. As language, Java was designed from the start to eliminate features that were, in the parlance of the day, "Considered Harmful". So yes, it was and is a bit restrictive. C# has a richer syntax, including "goto"... The richer syntax can be a plus because it often saves time in coding.

But creating code is what, 20% of the lifetime cost of a software package? And meanwhile C# provides the less disciplined programmer with plenty of opportunities to create write-only code. Never mind lambdas and closures --- I am not so sure that having properties in C# is a great idea, because their very purpose is to hide that code invocation happens. And I positively dislike the opt-out from declaring which exceptions a method throws. Exception handling is simply too important.

I am not convinced that it is such a bad thing that Java-the-language is 'stagnated'. As language, Java was designed from the start to eliminate features that were, in the parlance of the day, "Considered Harmful". So yes, it was and is a bit restrictive. C# has a richer syntax, including "goto"... The richer syntax can be a plus because it often saves time in coding.

But creating code is what, 20% of the lifetime cost of a software package? And meanwhile C# provides the less disciplined programmer with plenty of opportunities to create write-only code. Never mind lambdas and closures --- I am not so sure that having properties in C# is a great idea, because their very purpose is to hide that code invocation happens. And I positively dislike the opt-out from declaring which exceptions a method throws. Exception handling is simply too important.

Dude, "goto" was never eliminated in Java. It exists in Java in the extremely restricted form of a labeled break statement. And even without a full goto statement, the language still contains pretty much all the potentially harmful constructs (meaning all programming/control statements.) No amount of feature filtering will eliminate programming suckage as the idea of a "safer" programming language is an academic fallacy in anything but the narrowest, best well defined problem domains.

I am not so sure that having properties in C# is a great idea, because their very purpose is to hide that code invocation happens.

Nope. The very purpose is to simplify code usage. I don't gain anything by saying o.setName("name") when I can semantically get the same by saying o.name = "name". It was one of the greatest things that came out of Delphi, and there is a reason why it is the default way to access bean properties in EL/JSTL (firmly a Java technology) as well as in Groovy.

Unless that verbosity gets me something (clarity, better semantics) it is just syntactic salt with no associated benefit and certainly with an associated

I think that maintainability of code is helped most by writing the code in a way that closely follows the high-level model of the program. Neither C# nor Java are very good for that, because both require you to add a lot of boilerplate code and neither offers elegant metaprogramming. In other words, understanding the code is going to be hard because of the sheer amount of noise in it.

Sure, offering more powerful constructs such as macros would offer more ways to make the program a horrible mess, and some of

While all that is undoubtedly true, I question the extent to which its responsible for Java's loss in market share. Honestly, how many Java developers do you imagine even know what a "Hindley-Milner type inference" even is? Answer: not many.

I'd point to some other misc. reasons:

Full force of Microsoft marketing behind.NET and friends.

It's reasonable to expect many users to have.NET already installed on their machines, whereas the same can't be said for a JRE. So if I'm distributing a small desktop ap

I guess I should have been more specific on the performance thing. Mostly I was referring to two things: GUI performance, since Swing has traditionally been pretty turgid, and the ability to easily link with native libraries, which I have always assumed C# handles more elegantly than Java+JNI. As for general purpose performance, the jury's still out on that:

Although Java-the-language has stagnated a bit (I don't know if JDK 7 will ever be complete, due to all the feature cramming), but there's been a lot of activity during the past few years on other languages that run on Java-the-platform. Groovy and Rhino (Javascript) have been available for the JVM for quite a while. JRuby is actually faster than "native" Ruby for a lot of real-world applications. The Lisp-like Clojure language has a lot of fans. IMO, Scala is the most interesting out of all of these, with a very sophisticated type system, as well as functional features that the cool OCaml and Haskell kids seem to love.

All of these alternate languages can use the wealth of libraries available for Java, generally on all platforms on which the JVM runs. For example, I know of Scala apps that can run on Andriod, which is close enough to Sun's VM.

Although Java-the-language has stagnated a bit (I don't know if JDK 7 will ever be complete, due to all the feature cramming), but there's been a lot of activity during the past few years on other languages that run on Java-the-platform. Groovy and Rhino (Javascript) have been available for the JVM for quite a while. JRuby is actually faster than "native" Ruby for a lot of real-world applications. The Lisp-like Clojure language has a lot of fans. IMO, Scala is the most interesting out of all of these, with a very sophisticated type system, as well as functional features that the cool OCaml and Haskell kids seem to love.

All those third-party JVM-hosted languages have two big problems hampering their adoption.

The first one is lack of proper IDE support. And the problem with this target is that it shifts constantly - ten years ago we had much less than we have today. Think about how many automated Java refactorings a typical Java IDE offers today. Then there are things like code pattern search in IDEA. And so on... the challenge of making a new language is making all the tooling for it as well, and it inevitably competes with feature-rich and mature solutions that already exist for Java.

The second problem, which is probably even bigger, is the lack of a big corporate backer. With Java, there's Sun and Google. With C#, there's Microsoft. With C++, there are way too many to list - Intel, IBM, Apple, Sun, Google, Microsoft all have major stakes in it, and consequently work on language design together in the ISO committee. But something like Scala? What's the guarantee that it will be around tomorrow?

Which is a real pity, to be honest. Scala is an awesome language, probably the perfect in its (pragmatical hybrid OO/FP) niche. If e.g. Google were to seriously back it, it would really help its adoption. Unfortunately, it doesn't look like it's happening.

In contrast, the adoption drive behind F# (yes, there are fairly large companies out there using F# in production code) is largely because of Microsoft backing it, officially supporting it as part of VS, and so on - which is why I suspect it will keep growing.

I hear you on the poor java coding. I work in a shop that's 25% Java, 75% C/C++ (mostly C). You can pick a random class out of our Java code and immediately tell whether it was written by a C programmer or a Java programmer. All public variables, Hungarian notation, no thought for encapsulation or any OOD whatsoever. I'm not even though to get into the 10k line classes, or the 1500 line methods which is bad practice no matter what language. But those things aren't specific to my shop. From what I've s

Actually the field where java shines is the enterprise part and there it is really well located and very popular, banks corporations etc.. all use java they simply love its stability and portability (have in mind many of them run big irons, and java scales up and up on those machines)

if.net has managed one thing then to kill java from the desktop, but Sun is equally to blame there as well with Swing having been way to slow until java 4!Other than that.Net made major inroads in Windows dev shops and generally windows environments where it was to be expected if it was better than VB which it definitely was!

Besides that not sure in which world you live on the webapps side either, while flash has its place flex has hardly taken over the webapp space, in the last years I have encountered exactly one flex app in the wilds!Heck it is even hard to get an ajax app in somewhere, but ajax is way more common!

Yet another comment by someone who thinks Java is “applets in my browser”.

Java is THE dominant language for mobile phone development (96% of all phones support it, the other 4% allow it with a little precompiler), and “enterprise” server development (where is is the fastest mainstream non-C language, except for [maybe] OCaml/Haskell).

Java is not only going strong, with no decline in sight. It is dominant in many sectors.

I'm of the opinion that part of the reason for Java's slower than many anticipated adoption is just how badly it integrated into the native GUI environment of the host. For a very long time, and still persisting into the present, Java apps often looked downright awful on many systems. You can frequently tell something's a Java app purely by how ugly and out of place it looks compared to the native apps. Sun has made progress in addressing this, but it may be too little too late. I think the language as a whole is pretty good, and somewhat unfairly maligned, but the importance of the apps looking at least reasonable seems to have been underrated by the Java developers.

On the other hand,.NET is pretty much guaranteed to look at least reasonable on Windows. Of course, the fact it was targeted at Windows clearly goes a long way to simplifying this. I doubt Microsoft was thinking "We need to design this so it looks great and integrates on Windows, Linux, OS X, and everything else". But, that being said, for many developers it looking good on Windows is all that matters, in that it may be the only platform they're intending to develop for or support, so why go to all the extra effort in Java to make it look presentable when.NET makes it so much easier? There's of course many other pros/cons to each language, but I doubt the proliferation of ugly-as-sin Java apps is particularly good for its image, even if it is a very facile way of judging a language.

You may be right here. I have, on many occasions, had to program reasonable size DB apps in both.

Java.makes.me.want.to.claw.my.eyes.out().NET may only be truly on windows, but it's actually not so bad to code in. I wrote a DB reporting and maint. app in C# in roughly 2 weeks, the previous version of which in Java took almost 2 months.

Major things, IME that made the difference?Crazy easy remote DB access (sure, neither are exactly rocket science, but.net was quicker and more flexible)Easy installs - this had me from the start. I wasn't writing a web app, but a desktop app. The C# one was a breeze, the Java one a major headacheAttractive frontends - this will probably start yet another flamewar, but many of the java frontends are HIDEOUSPerformance when doing large dataset manipulations - for example, determining which server had the least free space, or which one had the most obsolete users. These are fairly trivial sorting tasks, but the java version took probably twice as long and more memory (in my implementation, which may well have sucked to be frank).Support for dumping data into Excel and Word - this was a killer feature. I was able to generate SOX and sizing reports on the fly with C#. Java? No such luck. I never did get it working quickly and properly.

I've had to re-write too much stuff because a java built in function relied on native libraries, which did not act the same (regular expression handling in 1.4 and earlier, is a good example - go betweeen HPUX, Linux and Windows, and there can be serious issues). A lot of the UI stuff doesn't work well between versions either.

It's gotten better, but on a similar note, anything I've used from.NET in VS 2003 and earlier, and quite a bit of later stuff, works just fine on Windows, Linux and FreeBSD.

Each has their flaws in cross platform use -.NET's issues tend to arise when using newer APIs, and Java tend to have small gotchas, which in most cases are rare, scattered throughout the code.

Then you are fortunate. The JVM is a good abstraction, but it is a leaky one. The point is that you can't just *assume* it will work on any platform that runs a JVM, which was the original (I would claim largely irrelevant) point behind WORA.

Or running java on the problematic platform, for whatever reason is non-trivial. In these cases, debugging takes a lot longer. Of course, the latter case can be blamed on bad business practices, and not the language itself. Still, when you expect something to be completely cross platform, it shouldn't rely on native implementations of anything, unless the code base is shared (ex. they could use OpenSSL instead of Sun's implementation since that seems to be everywhere).

I develop J2EE applications on a Windows machine as I prefer the snappier UI to X. My code runs, with no modifications, on Windows (duh), AIX, Linux and Linux running on zSeries platform. We have never needed to call platform-specific functions for our work as these are business applications. There is something really cool about using the development tool to push the same EAR to applications servers on several different platforms all from within the dev tool. Now the dev tool itself is a resource hog bu

The interesting thing was that Sun used WORA as a surrogate argument to accept the validity of virtual machines. It's hard to imagine now, but there was a time when VMs were treated with scepticism or outright hostility by most programmers.

These days it's hard to imagine creating a programming language that wouldn't adopt a VM of some kind.

Neither the CLR or the JVM truly enable WORA, but it doesn't matter. We have learned that VMs have a value to a programming language *far* beyond that rather limited concern.

Except the difference is that.Net derives most of its appeal from its tight integration with Windows. You try and port it and the OS simply doesn't have the supporting utilities you've built it to work with.

Java on the other hand is self-contained. So while you do have to do porting, Java code, in practice, doesn't make as many assumptions about the environment it's running in.

The joke I've heard about Java is "Write once, debug everywhere." I've certainly encountered trouble with it in terms of doing system support. Sometimes you find Java software that needs a specific version of the JVM to run. Newer won't do it, only that one works. This isn't because it is a custom version, it is because the JVM they used when writing it did things one way, and that changed and broke it later and they haven't wanted to update. Now you can argue that they should rewrite their code to support the new stuff, but you can also argue they shouldn't have to.

This isn't to say Java is useless cross platform, but I do get tired of hearing the crap of "Oh just write it in Java, it'll run everywhere!" No, actually, it very well may not.

I got the feeling Microsoft looked at Java and said, "Gee, people really like things that are multi-something, instead of multi-platform, let's do multi-language." Thus the CLI was born, but everyone just uses C# with.NET anyhow.

I'm on the verge of abandoning Java for my projects. Currently, there's just almost no business reason to use it. Microsoft tools (+ReSharper) are now as nice as tools for Java, ASP.NET is as good as any Java web framework, and WPF totally kills SWING on the client.

Oh, and Microsoft _really_ supports multi-language programming. MSVS 2010 has full official support for F# (Ocaml clone) and extensions for dynamic languages in the CLI. And even plain C# is _much_ nicer than Java (LINQ, anonymous types,

And the software written in C# for.NET that runs just fine on Mono with little or no modification.

The grandparent is trolling. The UI libraries that Visual Studio encourages you to use aren't as portable as Java's, but most everything else you'll use in.NET is every bit as portable as Java. Even when it comes to UI libraries, Mono has pretty good support for WinForms, and there are truly cross-platform libraries like Gtk# you can use instead.

If they wanted to completely depose Java then no, Java is still there.

If they wanted to introduce a Windows-centric alternative to re-invigorate desktop development and replace the horrors of C++ and VB with something with more modern and useful layers of abstraction and code checking that were already in Java (typed delegates, generic types, garbage collection, etc) then it seems to have done all right.

If they wanted to tear the OSS world in two with arguments over whether it.Net "teh evilz" or not then that'd be a definite yes, even thought more and more patent covenants are coming in to cover Mono (despite the fact that patent covenants shouldn't even be necessary if the legal system was sensible enough not to allow the patenting of software).

Strange that you mentioned 10 years, because as the article claims,.Net was announced in 2001, and introduced in 2002. So even if you started using it the day it came out, the framework is still only 7 years old.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.NET_Framework#Versions [wikipedia.org]

Do you by chance have one of those jobs posted circa 2004 asking for "10 years experience in.NET"?

I was initially excited by.net when it was first released and have preferred it over Java, which as a language seemed to have stagnate. Now, I am finding C# quite a disappointment with Microsoft not investing the time and energy to ensure the features they add to the language are polished:

Microsoft has a monopoly. Maybe less so than before on the "desktop" category, but to state the obvious their monopoly on "Windows" is 100%. So naturally, they have every advantage when creating products for their own platform, and they'll do everything legally possible to shove dev products down developers throats.

So I say whether they call it.Net or.Piss, it does not matter much. The success of ASP is a bi-product of their desktop advantage. If ASP.NET were sold by ASPsoft, then no one would buy it.

Business 101: How do you sell a product regardless of its quality?

Microsoft is great at this, as every other major US corporation is and should be.

BTW I am not saying anything about their quality. I am just saying it doesn't really matter much, because their software is sold by weight.

.NET is not limited to C#, although that is probably the most usual. Any language can be used so long as it is made to conform to the.NET CLR (Computer Language Runtime (?)) standard. In addition to the usual MS suspects, there are Third Party implementations of other languages that fit within that framework. This gives.NET development a flexibility that encourages development from experts in many domains dominated by other languages.
Has it delivered? If it continues to exist, yes.
Is it the best? Depe

No. People like.NET because of the very clean implementation of modern OOP principles. The drop & drag coding typically aims at mundane tasks. And the heavy OOP nature of.NET left behind a lot of the "developers" you're referring to.

How do you feel about the time and resources Microsoft has poured into developing Visual F#, Linq, Parallel Extensions, the DLR, IronPython/IronRuby, not to mention the funding of Microsoft Research, many of whose fellows such as Simon Peyton-Jones (maintainer of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler) are at the very bleeding edge of programming language research?

Are these the actions of a company that wants to stultify programmers' minds?

Microsoft, for all its failings, understands its developers. Always has.

People like.Net because MS offers tools to allow point & click programming. This means more people can do it and companies can lower wages.

In the same vein, computers and quickbooks allow more people to do accounting and lowers wages. Before this, a company needed an experienced accountant and a couple of assistants. Now all they need is a part time person to do the same work.
We should stop supporting computers.

You realize the "point and click" stuff is for laying out dialog boxes, right?

Writing boilerplate code to lay out controls and handle window messages wasn't some noble art that's been lost. It was low level tedium that distracted from real programming. I remember opening Petzold's Windows programming book and being horrified that the code for "Hello World" spanned several pages.

I don't know about your wages, but I get paid a fair amount for my time to write C#, and that time is a lot more productive and enjoyable thanks to such things as IDEs and component libraries.

But it has always seemed to me that shipping a commercial closed source product based on.Net is a huge challenge to ensure that it remains closed source. What do people do? Do they simply rely on one of the many obsfucation products out there?

At least in the good old days you could guarantee that disassembling your binary didn't give someone your C code without a bucket load more work

So far it seems Microsoft has been sincere about not planning to litigate against projects implementing.NET open source. I'd call that a success any day, given how the Microsoft of yesteryear would have thought about these things.

I'm very much pro-choice in terms of both choice of language/framework and in terms of proprietary vs. open source. Interoperability given a mix of these things is always good. With.NET you can choose different languages for different parts of your project, and properly written t

If web application development was still as horrible as it was with asp.net 1.1, I would have given up years ago. With.NET 2.0, it finally became usable. When they introduced AJAX update panels, it became far better than anything else in the market.

I've been using asp.net 3.5 lately, and I have to say that I am very happy with this development environment. Every other data access layer feel like a complete waste of time compared to LINQ to SQL. I love the way it helps me produce insanely good work very qui

Speaking strictly from a Windows development perspective, I think.NET has improved the experience somewhat compared to other kludgy frameworks (MFC / ATL). Assuming you don't plan on any cross platform deployments, you can implement your application within.NET using all of the capabilities of the operating system in an object oriented fashion. It's quick - it's easy - and C# is close enough to C/C++ that anyone with a programming background can pick it up.

Where Microsoft missed the mark is on the promise that their own applications would migrate to.NET. For example, Microsoft Office would get re-written as a.NET application. Ironically, I think it's because of the lack of cross platform capability that.NET was unable to meet this need. Microsoft has a number of key software products that need to run on both Mac and Windows. While native C/C++ can be easily ported, without a compatible CLR moving to Mac isn't that easy.

Had they been able to meet the portability objective (which they never promised), I think.NET could have been much more prevalent. For now, it will continue to be a second-best development environment for Windows computers (with C/C++ being the primary).

I think.NET is a good compromise (meaning that it is not the best but it is often good enough) on:
- learning curve (easy by design)
- functionalities (reflection, anonymous methods, attributes...)
- portability to different "Windows" (Mobile, Server...) and to other OS' (Mono)
- execution speed

I also agree that if Microsoft had distributed more software written in.NET (up to a complete OS) maybe the framework would have become more mature and more adopted.

I think the register is oversimplifying here. PHP, Ruby on Rails, Python, Scala... Sure Java is a complicated beast and it has become more and more difficult to sell to new customers, but.NET is not the only one eating Java's pie.
Now, I wonder: how much.NET customers have found out they overpaid for a.NET application when they could have done as good with an X language alternative?

If you expected cure for cancer, it failed miserably.However, if you were involved with any of the likes of MFC, ATL, Visual Basic 6 and bellow, DAO, Interop & COM (to name just a few), it is to be regarded as the second coming of Christ.

We use both heavily in our enterprise. I tend to lean toward Java because of the wide spread use across platforms. But I agree that the underlying framework of Java is ridiculously complex. We spend a huge amount of time dealing with the JRE rather than writing and supporting actual code.

On the other hand,.net, visual studio, MSSQL, AD, and IIS are a seriously tight integrated platform. I've seen even our most junior devs author amazing sites using the pure Microsoft tools.

Overall, I'd say I'm on the fence. I wish Sun would remove head from ass and get the JRE to a better versioning system that allows old apps to keep running along with new apps, similar to the.net framework methodology. If they could pull that off Java would really start to storm our environments.

1. They pissed all over Visual Basic, which has been used in a lot of fairly critical business applications since the mid-nineties to create applications quickly. Say what you like about it, but an experienced developer could develop very quickly and well with it and it is very widely used. With VB.Net they created an unnecessary and new object oriented language, the need for which was already being fulfilled by C#. I cannot see the point in it as it is merely another.Net language that differs via syntax only.

2. Again, VB related, for the first time you couldn't take your VB code, compile it in a new version of Visual Studio and get all the benefits. Expecting people to throw away millions of lines of code and start fresh for no benefit whatsoever is an epic fail and Microsoft diverged totally from their past views on this.

3. VB related again, but there is still no RAD environment for.Net. Many developers simply don't need the complexity of an object oriented environment foisted on them. They should have implemented VB with.Net as they have with IronPython and at least made it API compatible so you could recompile, or learned from Ruby with or without Rails. Java might be complex but.Net is still complex compared to what else is on offer.

4. As such, a great deal of applications, mostly VB, that could went web based and weren't re-written in.Net. At least with web applications you only need a very simple client and don't have to deal with that deployment shit.

5. There is still a ton of stuff written with COM, and interacting with it is still a huge PITA when it comes to deployment issues. They should have focused on simplifying this as much as possible. The.Net -> COM and COM ->.Net interaction seems to have been bolted on as an afterthought like they were being forced into it.

6. There are still a lot of applications where developers are not comfortable running it in a VM.

7. One area where.Net is even worse than Java is the moving goalposts. Over the years people have asked whether they should being using WinForms, Avalon and then WPF. No one seems to know. When Windows 9 or 10 comes out then why should I migrate to a yet another new UI or other technology that will not benefit existing users in any way, thereby not making me any money, because Microsoft now won't make new components like WPF available for existing platforms? At least if you develop for XP any applications on there will work on Vista or 7. They might not look as pretty, but making things pretty for a limited userbase doesn't make any money. Just take a look at the Mac.

Microsoft has lost a great deal of what made their development platforms attractive because they think they are losing money by doing it and there are too many divisions like MSDN wanting a piece of the action.

Sorry to respond to my own post (again), but I really, really wished that Microsoft added C99 support to their Visual C++ compiler. Does anyone know why they haven't?

I discovered the consequences of this as I tried to port over a project for school from Linux to Windows. Compiled perfectly on gcc, but failed dramatically when I used Visual Studio. (Yes, I know I could've use make instead of nmake to link gcc to it, but I don't think I should have to go through that kind of work just to say that Visual Studi

Where I live, on Dice.com [dice.com] there are 74 open ASP.NET, and 17 open PHP jobs.

You are totally talking out of your ass. I really hope you understand the irony of starting with, "please dont bullcrap if you are not in industry".

I may not be in the dumb, arrogant PHP developer industry, but I can assure you that I am in the industry. There is a good chance that if you haven't used a website that I helped develop, you have at least used one that my company has. Where I work, we use ASP.NET (Primarily.NET) and Java, but not PHP.

But hey, don't let that discourage you the next time you want to post an uninformed and totally inaccurate rant about PHP and how you are in the industry but nobody else is...

the projects you will see in contract websites like elance, rentacoder and the like will be predominantly php+mysql

Well of course you will. The projects on those sites are looking for cheap implementation and damn any sort of quality or maintainability. The register didn't look at those sorts of sites, they looked at recruiting sites instead, the ones businesses use. Using the slime pool that is the "Write me a twitter clone for $100" sites to say LAMP is the most popular in businesses is laughable.

Dear Sir,
I've done exactly as you suggested and search for those exact term on Monster and Dice. Moster (on a nation wide search in the US) returned 4 hits for "Java/J2EE/JEE" and 323 hits for ".NET/C#". On Dice.com "Java/J2EE/JEE" returned 6 hits while ".NET/C#" returned 644 hits. Is there some other search criteria I should try to see the advantage JAVA has?